Optimize your SEO strategy for the fall season
Powersports Business has turned to Pete Batten, chief product officer at Dealer Spike, to provide insight on optimizing your dealership’s SEO strategy for the fall season.
By Pete Batten
The autumn season is almost here, and consumers are turning their attention to the units and parts they plan to purchase for fall. While you may be between inventory shipments, now is the time to focus on your website’s SEO in order to increase your online rankings so that when your new inventory is available, your potential customers have already discovered your website.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it consists of adapting your website’s copy and design to meet the requirements of search engines to improve your ranking in online searches. Each time an online user performs an internet search, the search engine generates a list of results that are relevant to the user’s search. The main factors that search engines consider when creating this list is keyword usage and how well the website’s navigation meets modern standards.
More than ever before, consumers are using the internet to shop for units and parts, which means the success of your website and your business depends on SEO. By investing in SEO efforts over time, you can drive more potential leads to your online inventory, and then to your dealership. SEO takes time, so to boost the performance of your website as quickly as possible, you need to meet the standards of both search engines and the people who use them.
Your website content should satisfy the search engines’ algorithms while still maintaining good readability for real-life people, who don’t want to read clunky text. Infuse your content with high-performance keywords centered around the seasonal inventory you will be selling soon, but don’t stuff your content with keywords. Website visitors can tell when copy is written for search engines and not human eyes. By keeping your copy descriptive yet concise, you can deliver the information your audience is looking for while still meeting the search engines’ algorithms.
Up-to-date copy is something that both people and search engines want to see on your website. If your website copy hasn’t changed in the last few years, consider tweaking your current content to promote your upcoming inventory and any new services you’ve implemented. Maintaining a blog is a quick and sustainable way to prevent your site from becoming stale, and you can entertain your audience with insight on the best rides to enjoy the fall foliage and the importance of seasonal tune-ups.
Your website’s performance is also impacted by its usability. Is your website’s navigation clean and simple? Can online visitors quickly locate your inventory, lead forms and contact information? Consumers only spend a handful of seconds on a website if they can’t find what they’re looking for, so it’s vital to make your website as easy to navigate as possible. Search engines also consider a website’s navigation and will reward websites that they deem “user friendly.”
Keep in mind that SEO is an ongoing requirement for successful websites, as search engines continually update their algorithms and consumer needs change. By performing month-to-month optimization of your website, you can continue to meet search engine requirements and appeal to new and returning online visitors.
Pete Batten is chief product officer at Dealer Spike.
